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“Marxist atheism, which is basically post-atheist, is against any devaluation of man and nature. For idealism, the supreme being is God; for the materialism which is identical with humanism, it is man. The concept of God is the most abstract expression of domination, always combined with the dogmatic assertion that the world has a total, uniformly spiritual meaning. If God exists, revolutionary man no longer comes into the picture as the maker, not – admittedly – of a world meaning, but of a meaningful social whole in which each individual is uplifted and honoured. It is no accident that Prometheus was the most distinguished saint in Marx’s philosophical calendar. Human self-consciousness, he wrote in his dissertation, must be recognized as the ‘supreme divinity’. If theory proceeds historically from the mediating connection of man and nature in social production, atheism is no longer a purely ‘ideological’ position:

[quoting from the 1844 ms:]
“Atheism, as a denial of this inessentiality [of nature and man, A.S.] is no longer meaningful, for atheism is a negation of God, and asserts by this negation the existence of man. Socialism as socialism no longer requires such a mediation; it begins from the theoretical and practical sensuous consciousness of man and nature as essential beings.””

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Image: sculpture by Karel Appel